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Hilary Rosen sees the light on P2P

Now that Hilary Rosen no longer works for Tha Man, she's talking more sense on …

I'm keeping one eye on the window as I type this, because I expect a pig to fly by at any moment. Hilary Rosen, the former head of the RIAA , and I actually happen to agree on what's fundamentally wrong with the music industry. In a recent news post on CD piracy, I said the following:

What the music industry has is not a piracy problem, but a monopoly pricing problem. The "pirates" are just giving consumers the chance to purchase music in a real market. In asking the government to help them go after pirates, what the recording industry is really trying to do is get the government to help them work against the market by maintaining their monopoly pricing. It's ironic that in the name of "free trade" and commerce, Big Content is actually fighting to counteract the very market forces that they claim to champion.

Compare Hilary Rosen, in a recent editorial on why the music industry shouldn't look to the Supreme Court to fight its battles:

The central premise that tech will "wait until we are ready with our business models" is not going to work for the movie and television indsutries either.

So what the consumer is left with now are a few legitimate services that offer some great content and lots more illegal P2P choices that offer ALL the content plus a healthy dose of spyware, bad files and unwanted risk.

These are not legal decisions or trade association PR responsibilities on either side. They are fundamentally business issues that must be addressed in the marketplace. [emphasis added]

The entertainment industry has no choice right now but to speed up its licensing activity and risk-taking and the tech industry should start caring that they are not helping their customers when the easiest way to get entertainment content is to also accept spyware, viruses, and bad files in the process. Sure there are some promising things happening, but they are not being embraced nearly fast enough.

All the wisdom of the Supreme Court will not change that bottom line.

In short, the mother of the MGM vs. Grokster case now argues that the music industry's problem isn't a legal problem or a PR problemit's an outmoded business model problem that the marketplace is currently in the process of fixing whether anyone in the music industry likes it or not.

It's amazing how, when one is no longer in a position where one gets paid big bucks to spread lies and FUD, one's public pronouncements become so much more sensible. Rosen is now free to confess that truly, the invisible hand giveth and the invisible hand taketh away. Blessed be the invisible hand.

The big fat problem with such a late conversion on the part of Rosen is that the damage is already done. The MGM v. Grokster ruling may not actually hurt P2P one bit, but it will likely hurt some other innovator. Just because the court has set a fairly high bar, i.e. the inventor essentially has to market the technology as a tool for infringement before he or she can be held liable, that may not stop costly lawsuits intended to harass small-time innovators into giving up.

For some encouraging analysis of the MGM v. Grokster case, you check out Caesar's earlier post on the decision.